


The Cat He Feeds

by cognomen



Series: small god of words [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, M/M, mostly sweet with a little sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 11:33:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4178220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Did you ever consider," Pazzi begins from his doorway, calling into the space so that he does not surprise the intruder in his apartment, "what a bad idea it is for a pickpocket to break into the home of a policeman?" </i>
</p>
<p>-</p>
<p>AU for vignettes in which Pazzi met Anthony Dimmond telling poetry on street corners and relieving people of their wallets and the on-again-off-again relationship exists in moments of quiet, moments of absence, and moments of abundance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cat He Feeds

The apartment - not _his_ apartment, though Pazzi lives here and his name is on the contract, he thinks of it only as fleeting home, only his in passing and someone else's before and after - is not empty. He is used to the greetings of stale silence, having to turn the lights on when he returns from a long errand. Pazzi stays often in hotels or boarding houses. Sometimes all night at the Questura, with the smell of garlic and cigarettes, poking two fingers at the keyboard of his aging computer.

But this too - music on the radio, staticky Italian jazz on the one station the thick walls of the building allowed in, and the smell of unfamiliar smoke (cloves and tobacco) and food brought in from some restaurant somewhere - this is not unfamiliar, though it is uncommon.

"Did you ever consider," Pazzi begins from his doorway, calling into the space so that he does not surprise the intruder in his apartment, "what a bad idea it is for a pickpocket to break into the home of a policeman?"

Anthony appears at the end of the narrow hallway - by the small kitchen. He is holding his customary gift of wine and wearing his beautiful indulgent smile. He wears his years now, but in that way beautiful men can - gray through his hair but not dominating it and his eyes expressive, soft, upturned.

"I have a key, and I haven't picked a pocket in a very long time," Anthony assures him. It could be the truth. Pazzi has discovered in their short and long years of acquaintance that poets are very talented liars.

"You haven't picked a pocket where I could catch you in a very long time," Pazzi allows, and Anthony's charming, curved-crescent smile stretches on his talented mouth, just a little. He is taken with flattery, vain in a way he deserves to be.

Pazzi eases his coat off his shoulders while still in the small foyer space behind the door. It feels neater - and he feels the need to _seem_ neater in habit and lifestyle around Anthony - than throwing it over the back of a chair in the kitchen to be recovered again after a space of only hours.

"When I found you," Pazzi begins, stepping sock-footed onto the hall carpet. At the heel of his foot he can feel a hole worn in the sock. Embarrassing. Low class. He has had to find a way to make his rent and to make it seem like he has not been cast down so thoroughly. Invisible compromises. "I didn't know I had to keep you."

Anthony vanishes into the small, clean kitchen. White and steel, expensive to buy and expensive to keep clean. He stands out there, warm colors. Anthony pulls the cork and splashes wine on the counter top when he pours. The stain will be there when Anthony has gone again, purple and grainy.

"No one _keeps_ me," he reminds, his humor good and an allowance in his tone - they allow much of each other, the product of years of settling against each other. Like sugar at the bottom of a cannister, pressed into some shape but ready to collapse into individual grains when pushed on.

Impermanent, but recurring.

Anthony hands him a glass of very fine wine - his gift is a re-gift, the spoils of some other suitor who could provide the material demands for such a small god of words. Pazzi could not. He doesn't mind, Anthony comes to _him_ \- flies or sneaks like a cat or canary - for his company. Pazzi has become a better liar by Anthony's poetic influence as well; he has convinced himself that none of the others quite share what he and Anthony do.

"Nobody keeps you," Pazzi agrees, after the first warm and purple sip. Grapes and the land they had grown from on his tongue - not _his_ words that came to mind, but he knew where they had first been spoken. "You wander like a cat in heat."

"I've always liked cats," Anthony observes. His smile is a net - captivating and ready to engage. "You should get one."

"I have a cat," Pazzi answers. "I tell my neighbors when they complain about your noise, and say always, 'but you should hear him _purr_...'"

They do not need to play at flirting but it is old and comfortable. Sometimes they do not - Pazzi comes home and finds Anthony stretched naked and impatient on his bed and they say nothing first that isn't a command.

Pazzi does not tell him he likes this sort of night better, when Anthony wraps his pleasured smile on the rim of an old wine glass in Pazzi's kitchen and they play a little - kittens and string though they are both long since cats. Anthony shows no sign of what he prefers.

"I found something for you," Pazzi remembers, as Anthony's throat flashes with long swallows. He drinks too much always, but argues that his dick never flags and so it is not Pazzi's business to police him. These are not poetic words, vulgar but delicious anyway hissed angry in Pazzi's ear when their hands are wandering.

Sweet sea-blue eyes light with interest. Pazzi does not bring him things; he cannot usually afford it without seeming gaudy and small. But, Anthony likes his tributes. Usually, he is the one laying small dead gifts to share at Pazzi's feet, the Tom's concern and homage for a poor hunter.

Pazzi does not explain but turns deeper into the apartment. Anthony leaves his wine in the kitchen to follow - it will wait for him. It will be there when he returns, an allegory for Pazzi himself.

Anthony is burgundies and purples, carefully complimenting his eyes and the elegant graying he allowed in his hair. Pazzi had cut his off when instead of silvering it had gone from the dark of youth straight to the steel-shine of near white, creeping back from his hairline to an early widows peak. When it was longer, it had looked tired - the hair of an old man who was accepting it - he has kept it shorn ruthlessly short since.

From his very small closet, Pazzi offers a box - it is meant for shoes but too light to still contain them. It protects instead the folly of his indulged impulse - a purchase that had cost Pazzi a little in money. If Anthony laughs at it, at the sentimentality that Pazzi tried to forbid himself to display, it would cost him more in pride.

The scarf inside does not match Anthony's purples or reds, not his mauve and rich color. Pazzi reaches up, helping to unwind the one already coiled brightly around Anthony's neck. Pazzi's offering is gray tone - thin stripes in white on black with a material that touched skin and left is soothed and cool. Perhaps not silk, but a near synthetic.

Anthony does laugh as he threads it through his hands, but it is not a cruel laugh, and he leans back into Pazzi behind him, letting his head loll against Pazzi's shoulder so that he can look up with the whites of his eyes showing - as he looks up sometimes when his mouth is fixed on Pazzi's cock.

"A collar," Anthony suggests, and Pazzi realizes the blunder too late.

"You don't have to wear it."

Anthony turns against him and catches his fingers into Pazzi's tie - blacks and grays, bland checkers. All that he has are the same color. Anthony compares the two in his hands: stripes and checks. Match.

"You wear yours so dutifully," he says.

Pazzi drops the scarf Anthony ad worn over into the discarded shoebox, pulling Anthony closer to him. In their kissing, he wraps the new scarf into a tie at Anthony's wrists. Pazzi thinks he will not keep it. Better for it to be useful in some small pleasurable memory than a foolish feeling in his wallet.

Something he could call up later, alone with his hand around his cock - it did not stretch over him like Anthony's body did, but it was long familiar and with memories, satisfactory. Something, perhaps, that would stir behind Anthony's closed eyelids when he was making conquests.

It is Pazzi's small delusion of pride that Anthony does not think of others when he is with Pazzi. 

Anthony allows himself to be bound, though Pazzi can rarely guess what his mood will allow, he knows what parts of himself Anthony most appreciates. His features are too expressive, his focus too clear, and he had no embarrassment about demanding what he wanted in exact terms.

Tonight, Pazzi does not press him to beg - instead untangling him from his clothes and making no protest that he hurries them to the bed, fabric looped around one wrist too loosely for any effective hold. Anthony takes the suggestion of one, though, lifting his hands to the headboard and hanging on.

He makes the promised noises in sharp, high actor's cries as Pazzi stretches him open, making him as ready as possible for his heavy, thick cock. Not so much it makes things _too_ easy. They were both more satisfied to ride slow and deep along the sweaty, charged line of pleasurably full and the pain of too much. Until it could wring them both out and leave a soreness they'd both still feel when the rest faded to memories. 

Pazzi pulls what fevered repeats he can out of Anthony, enjoying the challenge of turning his begging over the precipice to sweet endurance, and over again until he had to admit a need to stop or an inability to go on.

In the morning, Pazzi makes breakfast - an expanse of fresh made scones and marscapone cheese, raspberry jam and dark, dark coffee. It may help boost the charge they have to last through the day. Pazzi thinks that Anthony always stays at least this long. He is the cat Pazzi feeds.

Then he goes, and Pazzi picks up the signs of his passage, making neat of the apartment as a reminder that it is not truly shared. He does not see Anthony take the scarf in grays, but finds the shoebox left empty.

If Pazzi knew Anthony would next wear it out hunting, he would not have felt warm light to see it gone.

He sees it next in a garbage bag, blood and discards of a heart impaled, and Pazzi thinks that this is what becomes of grayscale things. This is what will become, too, of Pazzi.

[End.]

**Author's Note:**

> -I had this idea briefly in a flash of madness about why Pazzi was so desperate and reckless in his search for Hannibal when two of the key features of why he was desperate and reckless (his wife, working for Verger) seem to be missing from the show universe. I could still be wrong, but the idea did tickle.
> 
> -Having mentioned this, once, to Quedarius the small idea proceeded to be fed back to me at a moment of extreme weakness so I did all of this in a rush. The physical copy went out in a letter, the digital belongs to everyone now.


End file.
